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Donald Trump is Toast

There has been a great deal written about Robert Mueller investigating whether the Trump campaign, possibly including Trump himself, colluded with the Russians to influence to last Presidential election. There has also been a lot written about whether Trump has committed obstruction of justice. Mueller is also investigating Trump for income tax fraud and money laundering. The main stream media has largely ignored those last two issues but Mueller has assigned FBI agents specializing in tax fraud and money laundering to his team so it is obvious that Mueller is seriously investigating Trump in those two areas.

One interesting thing about the Mueller investigation is that he has convened not one but two grand juries. I am assuming that he has two simply because a full blown investigation into four different issues would probably be too much disparate information for one grand jury to handle.

I think he has split up the work between the two grand juries as follows:

One grand jury is handling Russian collusion and obstruction of justice while the other grand jury is handling money laundering and tax fraud. This split would also separate the investigation of Trump the candidate/President from the investigation of Trump the private citizen. The reason I think this is important is that during the Ken Starr investigation of President Clinton the question arose whether you could indict a sitting President. Ken Starr assigned one of his staff to research that issue and her conclusion was that, yes, you could indict a sitting President but only for things unrelated to his presidential duties, a conclusion which I agree with. The grand jury split mentioned above would have one grand jury handling issues related to Trump’s presidential duties while the other grand jury would be handling issues unrelated to his presidential duties

This split would also result in one grand jury handling people oriented investigations and the other grand jury handling document oriented investigations.

Document oriented investigations move faster. Consider how long it would have taken Mueller to get copies of Trump’s tax returns from the IRS, and he does have copies of those returns, and compare that to how long it is taking Mueller to arrange an meeting with Steve Bannon. This means that the investigations of the Trump family tax returns and possible money laundering will almost certainly be completed before the Russian collusion investigation.

Ordinarily an investigator such as Mueller would wait until an investigation is complete before having the grand jury issue any indictments of the main target of the investigation, but if there were any ongoing related investigations the indictments would be sealed until all other investigations were complete. In this case, however, Trump has threatened to fire Mueller and some Republicans in Congress have called for Mueller to be fired and the investigation into collusion with Russia by Trump or his campaign terminated. As a result I think that Mueller has decided that as soon as he has solid evidence sufficient to justify an indictment of Trump for either money laundering or tax fraud he would have the grand jury issue a sealed indictment even while the money laundering and tax fraud investigations were ongoing. Furthermore I suspect that Mueller has told the grand jury that if he, Mueller, is fired then unseal all indictments and issue them. This would act as insurance against Trump firing Mueller or Congress moving to terminate the investigation, say by cutting off all funding.

To sum up, I think there are probably already sealed indictments of Trump for money laundering and/or income tax evasion, but Trump just doesn’t know it.